Friday, December 11, 1998

Ever wonder why American fiction got so weird so quickly in the 1960s? Why the likes of Thomas Pynchon, John Barth, William Gass, and Cynthia Ozick started weaving labyrinths that made nascent literary mighties like John Updike and Saul Bellow seem obsolete before their time? Aside from the advent of LSD, it’s almost as simple as this: Jorge Luis Borges got translated into English.

Borges’ world of infinite libraries, cabalistic societies, infinitesimal memories, and apocryphal histories had long been one of the main driving forces behind what came to be known as magical realism, but outside of Latin America, almost nobody knew who he was, and so when his greatest-hits collection, Labyrinths, reached the States in 1962, everything changed.

Over the years, several other volumes of poetry, prose, and essays followed Labyrinths, but now, twelve years after Borges’ death, Andrew Hurley has translated his entire catalogue of stories, prose poems, and parables into English.

Although there are no proper essays in the Collected Fictions, Borges often blurs the line between fact and fiction, frequently calling his essays stories and his stories essays. And he often writes himself and his friends into his pieces so that the reader never knows if what the story relates happened or not. The influence on postmodernism is clear (see William Vollmann’s work), and with the text falling back on itself to examine and question its own authenticity and authority, the reader often ends up getting lost in an ambiguous maze with no center.

But despite the literary games set up to undercut them, Borges’ stories are some of the most vividly imagined since Kafka’s. Take for instance “The Library of Babel.” The narrator describes his universe as an endless (or cyclical) library comprising an innumerable number of rooms, all identical and each with the same number of books. The books are identical in format, and each one represents a unique combination of the twenty-five lexical symbols. It sounds like a wanky philosophical exercise, but in Borges’ hands it’s a thrilling—and terrifying—examination of what happens to individuals when they’re faces with the infinite.

Take also “Funes, His Memory,” in which a simple country boy falls off his horse, hits his head, becomes paralyzed, and is ever after blessed (or cursed) with limitless memory. Borges spends pages recounting Funes’ mnemonic feats but then ends up lamenting how the boy’s infinite memory warps—and ends up replacing—his present.

Hurley’s task as translator is only slightly less daunting than cataloging the Library of Babel, but aside from a few inconsistencies and weird word choices (“gaol” for “jail”), he does an admirable job. The translation is lucid and readable, allowing the reader a clear glimpse into the worlds Borges imagined.

But be warned: Borges’ readers are no less at the mercy of the infinite than are his characters. The man’s awesome imagination and vast erudition are as terrifying as they are entertaining, and too much at one time can induce vertigo. But for the brave reader, there are few pleasures as satisfying as surrendering to such a monumental writer.

Friday, May 1, 1998

Notes From Underground: American Literature,

Alive and Well and in the Hands of Maniacs

Originally published in the Underdog, a journal published by the University of Amsterdam’s English Department, April/May 1998

Does American literature make you yawn?
Are you bored to tears by novels about farms or divorces or the minute workings
of the suburban family? Then chances are you’ve been paying too much attention
to the New York Times bestseller
list, or the recent list of Pulitzer Prize winners. Because let’s face it:
Boring sells in America, when it comes to literature, at least. Most readers
don’t want to be challenged by alternate views of the world they live in—be
they challenges in viewpoint or formal literary innovations. The book-buying
public wants stories about an America that doesn’t really exist, a logical,
rational place unsullied by the self-reflexive problems—or triumphs—of
postmodernity. In other words, we want the world sold to us on television, and
we don’t want to question that world—or the conduits through which we receive
that world.

But
fortunately, there’s a strong undercurrent working against this seemingly
monolithic flow of domestic blah—a fistful of young (as well as older) writers
not only showing us the America we feared existed, but doing it in ways that
challenge the very place—and purpose—of literature. Not satisfied with
producing “slices of life” in the conventional sense, our best writers’ work is
a complex dialogue with reality—or “reality,” since the way these writers
portray the world often dismisses the notion of any kind of objective or
capturable truth. Rejecting the sanitized TV world, these writers’ work is like
the notion of TV itself—bizarre, choppy, problematic, unsettling, endlessly
self-referential and, above all, postmodern.

Leading
the pack—or maybe being the entire pack himself—is the thirty-eight-year-old
novelist William T. Vollmann. Extending the fictional legacy left him by the
previous generation’s literary weirdoes—Thomas Pynchon, William Gaddis, Toni
Morrison, Don DeLillo and Cynthia Ozick, to name a few—Vollmann stands as one
of our most exciting—and disturbing—fictioneers. Having published approximately
5,000 pages worth of material in the last eleven years, Vollmann is charting a
literary world that’s as breathtaking in its vision as it is exhausting in
scope. Mixing together the fantastic and the ostensibly real, his world is a
creepy, ever-shifting confusion of reportage and myth, and his overall effect
on the reader—like that of Pynchon or Gaddis or even Melville—is a strange
feeling of having journeyed through a parallel universe that only calls
itself America.

In
1982, having just graduated from Cornell University, Vollmann crossed into
Afghanistan with Islamic commandos, gathering material for what would become The Afghanistan Picture Show, and after
that he worked as a computer programmer in San Francisco. I interviewed
Vollmann two years ago for The Minnesota
Daily, and he says that he wrote his first novel, You Bright and Risen Angels, while living in his office. He worked
for eight hours, slept for eight hours, and wrote for eight hours, and the
resulting novel is one of the most astonishingly weird books of our time.
Although not as successful in artistic terms as his later work, You Bright and Risen Angels invented a
new world of possibility for the novel. Narrated both by someone called “The
Author,” a man working in a computer programming office, and by “Big George,” a
ubiquitous electrical force that oversees everything, the novel tells the story
of a bloody revolutionary war between insects and electricity. With two
narrators, the reader never knows who’s speaking or who’s in charge of the
text, and with the story jumping between stylized versions of American history
and absurd flights of imagination, the novel challenges almost every assumption
about what a novel is supposed to do.

Vollmann’s
second book, The Rainbow Stories, is
probably my favorite of his works, addressing such diverse subjects as neo-Nazi
skinheads, prostitution, Islamic assassins, and the Bible. Each story takes up
a different color, and the result is a widely variegated vision of Vollmann’s
literary spectrum. Vollmann’s most recent book, The Atlas, attempts a similar scope, the stories spanning both the
literal globe and the author’s literary globe, and with a palindromic structure
holding the stories together, the collection falls back on itself like a book
closing itself at its end. Vollmann is also at work on a series called Seven Dreams, which tells the history of
America beginning with the first interactions between Native Americans and
Norse conquerors and probably taking us up to the present day. He’s published
the first, second, and sixth volumes of the series, and he’s sporadically
working on the others as we speak. Also highly recommended is his short novel Whores for Gloria, which, like Pynchon’s
The Crying of Lot 49, presents a
brief, bizarre, and endlessly suggestive nightmare vision of the American
underworld.

Like
Vollmann, our other leading literary lights are the ones who challenge us both
textually and contextually, taking up not just new fictional territory, but
also new ways of exploring that territory. The biggest standouts seem to be
David Foster Wallace, Rikki Ducornet, and Richard Grossman, who are all writing
novels as if they were not just reinventing the wheel, but were inventing
something completely unimagined. Wallace’s novel Infinite Jest is probably the best example of what I’m talking
about; taking on politics, popular culture, family life, and the novel itself,
it explores the world of art and entertainment in ways that question their very
nature. And at almost 1,100 pages, you’d think he’d be able to come up with
some kind of exhaustive lexicon of the states of art and entertainment; but in
his most postmodern move, the novel ends about 600 or 700 pages short of
resolution. Although it may be somewhat influenced by Vollmann’s first novel,
which constantly refers to forthcoming (and nonexistent) volumes and whose
table of contents covers about three times more ground than the novel itself, Infinite Jest’s ending suggests new ways
for novels to think about themselves. It’s massive and incomplete, and this may
be the best we can hope for these days.

Rikki
Ducornet, although not as young as Vollmann or Wallace, is still on the cutting
edge of what’s going on in American letters. But while those two bring to mind
Pynchon or Gaddis, she recalls writers such as Lewis Carroll, the Marquis de
Sade, Kafka, and Borges. Unlikely bedfellows, for sure, but in Ducornet’s zany
literary universe, absurd juxtapositions are the name of the game. She throws
anything she can think of into her books, and what results is a kind of
salmagundi that sometimes seems disconnected but invariably adds up to
something amazing. Her best book is Phosphor
in Dreamland, which is an epistolary novel telling the story of the
semi-mythic island Birdland, focusing on its most famous inhabitant, a
seventeenth-century poet, philosopher, and artist named Phosphor. When I
interviewed her last year, Ducornet cited the late British novelist Angela
Carter as a big influence (and friend), and like Carter (and Phosphor),
Ducornet is a rare bird who defies all categorization.

The newest writer on my list is Richard
Grossman, who’s at work on a series called the American Letters Trilogy, which depicts America as Hell, Purgatory,
and Paradise, respectively. The first volume, The Alphabet Man, which tells the story of a poet/murderer named
Clyde Wayne Franklin, is a crazy mishmash of straight narrative, poetry,
disjointed hallucinations, and linguistic experiments. It’s a little like
William Faulkner on LSD. The second volume, The
Book of Lazarus, is even stranger (and better), weaving letters, photos,
epitaphs, aphorisms, and reminiscences into a tale of political and social
creepiness and ambiguity. Grossman is working on the third volume at present,
so we’ll have to wait a while to get to Paradise.

Of
course there’s a lot more great work going on in American literature than the
wacky postmodern stuff I’m into. There are plenty of conventional writers, such
as Tobias Wolff, Jayne Anne Phillips, and Richard Ford, who are challenging in
their own ways; especially recommended are Wolff’s story collection In the Garden of the North American Martyrs,
Phillips’ novel Shelter, and Ford’s novel Independence Day. But as far as what’s
pushing the envelope of fictional possibility, this weird stuff is where it’s
at.

Thursday, April 23, 1998

A review of Debut Novel, by Stefania Procalowska

Originally published in The Minnesota Daily’s A&E Magazine,April 23rd, 1998

Debut NovelBy Stefania ProcalowskaManic D Press, $22

The
late Kathy Acker wrote in her review of Richard Grossman’s novel The
Alphabet Man, “I have dreamt a book, not a book that tells a story, not
even one that tells story upon story, all of them intertwining and changing one
another’s meanings, but a book that simply is everything.” As amazing as Grossman’s
novel is, it’s a shame Acker didn’t live to read Stefania Procalowska’s debut
novel, Debut Novel, which although just a slim 193 pages, contains more
and does more than almost any of the massive lexicon novels published this
decade.

Initially,
the most arresting aspect of the novel is that it’s written in first
person—from the reader’s point of view. It begins, “I just opened Stefania
Procalowska’s debut novel and found that I’m the main character.” Although this
recalls Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City, which employs a
gimmicky second person that doesn’t really do anything challenging, Procalowska
uses this innovation literally to project the reader into her novel’s insane
world—a world in which not just the reader but the words on the page and the
book itself are characters. And unlike McInerney’s gendered “you,” there’s no
indication of whether the reader is male or female, and as with Jeanette
Winterson’s Written on the Body, it doesn’t really matter.

After
a few pages of preliminaries, where “I” become acclimated to being both reader,
narrator, and main character, I’m unceremoniously thrust into a quest for
certain missing parts of the novel—parts that I as a reader require but
Procalowska, who jumps in every once in a while to remind me that it’s just a
book and not reality, refuses to furnish. In the course of “my” quest, I end up
taking a whirlwind tour of Procalowska’s cracked literary universe, which
includes everything from Biblical figures to altered historical accounts to
literary characters to television and ’60s and ’70s pop culture. At one point,
I find myself thumbing through the pages of Wuthering Heights with
Zechariah and Don Cornelius (Jesus’ second cousin and the host of Soul Train,
respectively, which makes for an interesting examination of Black/Jewish
relations), looking for a narrative structure that could rein in the
multi-layered, genre-hopping mess I’ve found myself in.

Certainly,
the layer upon layer of storytelling recalls Wuthering Heights, but it
does so in a way that recalls the way Kathy Acker’s Blood and Guts in High
School recalls The Scarlet Letter—that is, in a stylized and bent
manner that not just reinterprets the story, but revises it and incorporates it
into the story at hand. So after a while, Bronte’s two Catherines make their
way into the novel to help me along. And to further complicate the issue, I
also find myself sidetracked into reading Joyce Elbert’s 1969 trash novel The
Crazy Ladies (which in an utterly amazing literary confluence, I [the book
reviewer, not the character in the book] actually read as a kid), and the
characters from that book come alive to counter anything the Catherines say.

One
of the funniest things about Procalowska’s use of things literary is her
treatment of the self-reflexive trappings of the publishing world. In my search
through Procalowska’s imaginary bookshelf, I’m as influenced by the book
jackets as by the books themselves, so my understanding of my reading—and of Debut
Novel itself—is colored greatly by the blurbs on books’ back covers. My
favorite is the (presumably real) blurb for The Crazy Ladies, which
reads, “Philip Roth, bow your head. Irving Wallace, eat your heart out. Joyce
Elbert’s back in town.” So naturally Roth and Wallace enter into the book to
debate Joyce Elbert’s literary worth, which of course is colored by the
pejorative blurb about themselves. Procalowska’s wackiest blurbs, however, are
the ones she puts on the back of Debut Novel itself. Citing such bogus
periodicals as The Journal of Masonic History and Bug World,
Procalowska both praises herself and pokes fun at the ways novels market
themselves. And in a truly cool literary move, the blurbs turn out to be the
key to (almost) understanding the novel’s ending. So don’t skip them.

Debut
Novel isn’t all fun and
games, however. Embedded within the stories-within-stories is a deep concern
for the state of contemporary art and entertainment, and consequently for the
state of contemporary America. In using both literary and popular references,
juxtaposing the decadent with the ostensibly meaningful—or the sacred with the
profane—Procalowska creates a vast array of literary and ethical choices that
makes “me” explore my role as reader, consumer, and citizen—as well as
Procalowska’s role as artist. Because with so much fluctuating and
irreconcilable narrative madness, the question arises, is she in control of the
text? And do I have any real choices or meaningful work to do as a reader? And
is making me ask these questions part of her overall plan, making me think I
have some critical power while still asserting her true control over me as the
helpless reader? Because, let’s face it, this novel is a page-turner, and I
can’t help but keep reading.

The
obvious comparison is to an ironic television show that sells me a particular
point of view while making me think I’m in on the joke. While watching the
show, is there any way I can examine it critically, and is my detached critical
view just another layer accounted for by clever marketers to keep me watching?
So the ultimate question ends up being, is Procalowska putting one over on me
or is she truly making me look critically at what I’m reading? And does it
matter? It’s tricky ground she makes the reader tread, and the novel’s
ending—if you can call it that—gives few hints at what she wants “me” to
conclude about the novel. Maybe this is my only real freedom as a reader, and
it comes just in time. The 193 pages that make up Debut Novel, although
addictive, are exhausting reading, and even if I come to no conclusions, I
leave the book profoundly altered. Let’s hope Procalowska’s sophomore effort
(will she call it Sophomore Effort?) continues in this relentless vein.

From folks like Pier Paulo Pasolini and Woody Allen to Ally Sheedy and Ethan
Hawke, film people love to write books, and that’s not always such a good idea.
Granted, Pasolini’s a genius, but when you’re faced with a book of Leonard
Nimoy’s love poems or Charlton Heston’s manly aphorisms, you know that
something’s wrong with the publishing business. A Crackup at the Race Riots,
the new “novel” by filmmaker Harmony Korine (Gummo), seems to fulfill
all the best and worst expectations for such an undertaking.

At
its best, A Crackup at the Race Riots is a hilarious jumble of
half-baked scenes and ideas. And that’s what it is at its worst, too. Tossing
together jokes, rumors, lists, vignettes, drawings, and suicide notes, Korine
seems out to annoy rather than entertain or move the reader. The suicide notes
can be pretty amazing, though, and some of the rumors are downright ingenious
(e.g. Jerry Garcia tongue-kissed his older sister on his deathbed), but mostly
it’s just silly and juvenile. Pretentious too—he’s constantly making references
to folks like Proust and Walter Benjamin, as if he’s really read them. And
there’s one section that’s plagiarized word-for-word from Donald Barthelme’s
story “Conversations with Goethe.” But if we call it “sampling,” (the ultimate
postmodern form), I guess we can let him get away with it. Or better yet, skip
the book and go rent Gummo.

Although compiling an anthology of postmodern fiction seems antithetical to the
very idea of postmodernism, the folks at Norton have made a bold (if ironic and
cynical) attempt at doing just that—boldness, irony, and cynicism of course
being three prominent markers of postmodernism. Skimming the cream of half a
century of American Postmodernism, as well as including nearly a dozen essays, Postmodern
American Fiction tries to capture an aesthetic that by its very nature
eludes clear definition, as well as purports to canonize works that were
largely written against the idea of the canon. So what we have here is a
canon of the uncanonizable.

Once
you accept the premise that this anthology isn’t an absurd undertaking, the
first thing that proves you wrong is the introduction. Postmodernists generally
rail against any kind of objective authority system—especially those that fade
into the background to become implicit (see Thomas Pynchon’s 1973 novel Gravity’s
Rainbow, where the main antagonist is the sinister and ubiquitous “Them”).
And what does this anthology do? It begins with an introduction without a
byline. As if the anonymous essay were the ultimate lowdown on what
postmodernism is, not even needing to sully itself with a living, breathing
(and biased) author. It’s downright weird.

Aside
from that, it’s actually a pretty handy introduction. I guess we’re supposed to
assume that it’s written by the three editors, Paula Geyh, Fred G. Leebron, and
Andrew Levy, each focusing on his or her area of expertise. And They seem to
cover a lot of the bases. They analyze the impact of the Second World War on
literature and culture, discussing the relationship of so-called postmodernity
(a cultural term) with the emerging group of writers that critics have labeled
the postmodernists (a literary term). Also, They chart some of postmodernism’s
influences in the modernist and avant-garde artistic movements, making a
compelling and informative summary of how postmodernism evolved.

The
most interesting thing in the introduction, however, is the section headed
“Postmodern Fiction and Postmodern Theory,” which reads pretty convincingly but
ends up eroding the book’s entire authority. The discussion of
antifoundationalism begins with the statement, “If any one common thread unites
the diverse artistic and intellectual movements that constitute postmodernism,
it is the questioning of any belief system that claims universality or transcendence.”
Seems pretty accurate, but then when They go on to discuss the impossibility of
objective truth on the part of any kind of foundation, or the veracity of “the
official story,” it’s like saying “this statement is false.” Postmodern critics
are caught in a Catch-22 that nullifies any authoritative statement They could
make. And this volume just accentuates the problem.

Nevertheless,
this is a really fun anthology. They break it down into six sections of
fiction, each one exploring a particular aspect or style that (sometimes) fits
into the postmodern rubric, and one section of essays. The first section,
“Breaking the Frame,” is kicked off, natch, by Thomas Pynchon. It’s kind of a
misleading beginning, however, because while Pynchon is undoubtedly the Big
Kahuna of postmodernism, he’s hardly the first one writing in this style. Which
brings up the anthology’s biggest problem: There’s no William Gaddis. He’s not
even mentioned in any of the sections or in the index at the end. It’s
probably attributable to the fact that They want to make the first selection
(from Pynchon’s 1996 novel The Crying of Lot 49) jibe with Their idea
that literary postmodernism begins in the 1960s. Not True. Gaddis’ 1955 novel The
Recognitions lays the groundwork for almost everything that’s covered in
this anthology’s pages, and on top of that, it out-mind-boggles even Pynchon.

Still,
the selections here are quite good. Including folks like Donald Barthelme,
William Gass, Ishmael Reed, Carole Maso, and Lynn Tillman (Women mostly get
shunted to the end of the section! And, hey, where’s Cynthia Ozick?), They
fairly accurately cover the writers that most challenged conventional narrative
styles and forms. Although They do make the cardinal sin of referring to Gass’
story “In the Heart of the Heart of the Country” as canonical. How
unpostmodern!

The next
section, “Fact Meets Fiction,” seems a bit iffy, despite some fine selections.
It includes William T. Vollmann, the reigning idiot-savant of American letters,
as well as Theresa Cha and Gloria Anzaldua, which are pretty great choices. But
if you want to believe that Truman Capote and Norman Mailer are postmodernists,
I guess that’s your business.

The
“Popular Culture and High Culture Collide” section would be better served by
David Foster Wallace’s wacky “Little Expressionless Animals,” which features
Pat Sajak and Alex Trebek as characters, but it’s still a good representation.
There’s Laurie Anderson (yes, the musician) and Jay Cantor and Lynda Barry
(comic book writers), as well as the obligatory Robert Coover selection.

The
“Revisiting History” and “Revisiting Tradition” sections explore alternative
versions of the past—both historical and literary. The main gripe here is that,
no matter how challenging it is, Toni Morrison’s Beloved is really more
modernist than postmodernist. Other questionable (but artistically great)
inclusions are E.L. Doctorow and Marilynne Robinson, but the John Barth, Kathy
Acker, and David Foster Wallace selections are right on, as are most of the
others.

The
“Technoculture” section might be the most interesting of the lot. Starting
things off with William Gibson and including a big chunk of Don DeLillo’s 1985
novel White Noise, this section explores the looming presence of
technology as both subject and tool of fiction. While White Noise delves
into the utter creepiness of modern technology, the J. Yellowhees Douglas and
Michael Joyce stories embrace it wholeheartedly. Unfortunately, I haven’t read
the latter selections, because they’re hypertext stories posted on Norton’s
website, and my crappy Mackintosh SE isn’t hooked up to anything except the
wall outlet (and look who’s calling other people un-postmodern!).

Despite
the sheer impossibility of its task, Postmodern American Fiction gives
an intriguing overview of what’s been happening in (and to) American literature
in this half of the century. With the “Casebook of Postmodern Theory” rounding
things out, it offers a comprehensive, if problematic, look at the radical
changes in American literature since your professors graduated from college.
Along with Gaddis’ The Recognition, this anthology works as a terrific
supplement to what you learned in your English classes. Buy them both for
yourself as your graduation presents